PuTTY from within LinuxThe PuTTY client is a well known xterm client that was designed to work inside of Windows to connect to Unix-Like systems. Did you know that the client is available in a number of Linux distributions as well? Here are some of my uses and thoughts on this tool.

One-liner to call up a group of putty sessions based on ip address range.

In this script we are opening a single connection on the default port of 23 to each host in the range of $i. As soon as the the first session is killed the next one will start as it iterates through the list. This script will also change the background color to blue and the foreground color to white. To adapt this to your use you will need to adjust the first 3 octets of the network address to the networks you are trying to reach. The range of $i represents the hosts 192.168.100.200 through .225.

One-liner to call up a group of putty sessions based on tcp port range.

In this script we are opening telnet sessions on port 2034, 2035, 2036, 2037, 2038 through the terminal server foo.bar. These sessions will run as background processes, so each putty instance will be displayed at the same time.

Shred “when you absoluytely have to kill everything on your hard drive.” This program will overwrite a hdd or partition with all 1’s so that all data is unreadable• http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_shred.htm• as root shred -n 2 -z -v /dev/sda• the -n defines how many times you want it to write to the hdd. The default is 25.• -z is to do one last overwite with zeros.• -v is for verbose and shows progress.

MakuluLinux: http://www.makululinux.com/• MakuluLinux is a Debian-based distribution providing a sleek, smooth and stable user experience on any computer. It includes pre-installed multimedia codecs, device drivers and software for everyday use. (I figured this would save me the time of doing all the work myself)• You can download it in Xfce, Kde, Mate, Enlightenment• I downloaded the Enlightenment version. It came preloaded with many themes, wallpapers, start up graphics, etc. • the best part is the Sources.list file. its pulling from:• Debian Testing• Debian multimedia• Linux mint Debain main• Solydxk main upstream (an unoffical LMDE variant)• Then ones for Opera, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Talk, Google Music, and Skype

users and groups: • Makulu is nice but it comes with a pre setup user “makulu” and password for both user and root “makulu”. This of course is no good so I had to create a new user, give it sudo permission. Change the root password. Then I when I logged into e17 I found out that the created user could not shut down the system in e17. I had to log out then shut the system down from the login screen. So I had to create a group called “power add”, give the group permission in the /etc/enlightenment/sysactions.conf to halt, reboot, hibernate, and suspend. • to add a user, as root type: adduser username • to give a user sudo access it is simplle just as root or with root permission type: adduser username sudo(of course this assumes that you already have sudo installed or setup on your system)• now to change the root password is very easy just type in: su root to switch to the root user than type in passwd and then enter in your new root password• now I can’t say for other DE but in e17 a default new user does not have permission to do things in elightenment like shutdown or reboot the system. So this is what I had to do http://wiki.bodhilinux.com/doku.php?id=user_-_shutdown_privileges• first as root or with sudo create a new group called power by typing: groupadd power• then just like when you added a user to the group sudo what you want to do is add your new user to the group power by typing (once again make sure you have root permission): adduser username power• Then using your favorite text editor edit the /etc/enlightenment/sysactions.conf file like this:• sudo nano /etc/enlightenment/sysactions.conf• then go down to the part of the file that says group: plugdev allow: * add to the next line group: power allow: halt reboot suspend hibernate• then reset the machine and log in as username and you will now be able to shutdown reboot etc• Finnaly now that you have your new user added with sudo and power permission and the default root password has been changed it is time to clean up and kill the old default user.• with root permission type userdel -r usernamethis will delete the user and the users home directory

FiftyOneFifty discusses the IRC bots Phenny & Madcow

• Phenny (by Sean B. Palmer, who has now moved on to saxo, ) is the template for most, if not all, Python based IRC bots• Download and extract http://inamidst.com/phenny/phenny.tar.bz2, run downloaddir/phenny• Edit ~/.phenny/default.py• edit nick =, You will need an unque nick, not registered to anyonre else• host = ‘server’ ie irc.freenode.net• channels = [‘#channelname’, ‘#otherchannelname’]• owner = ‘yournick’• password = ‘yourIRCpwd’• admins = [‘yournick’,’friendsnick’]• launch bot with ~/phenny/phenny• set cronjob to reload phenny on reboot of local server• We tried phenny on my server for a while, but it proved unreliable on rejoin after netsplits (we set up the IRC during a period of frequent DDoS against Freenode)• We tried MadCow, but it was unreliable delivering messages — Botname tell user <message>

Installation:• download & extract zip file from jenni Github – I chose to do this in my /home, not recommended to run as root• cd to the jenni-master folder and view the file README.md• run the script file with ./jenni• edit the main config file – ~/.jenni/default.py• to start jenni run ~/jenni-master/jenni• LugB0t is running on a Raspberry Pi

Automation:• Tony Beemus provided a script that will start the bot at boot and check that it stays connected after a netsplit• Delwin wrote us a python module to display the next show recording – type .ns in the irc chat input

•Held at the Residence Inn Marriot Hotel in Cambridge, MA•Got there early and talked for a while with a guy who works in IT for a school system in VT. He converted all his middle school kids to Ubuntu.•Got to meet Tracy Holtz, Russ Wenner, Martin Obando, Pokey, Flying Rich, Door, Jonathan, and Bruce. I also got to talk to a person by the name of Will Weaver. He gave a talk on docker that I am sorry that I missed. Docker seems very interstinig and hope to try it out soon. I missed his talk but all of the talks are posted on http://northeastlinuxfest.org/.

The talks I saw were:

• Jon “Mad Dog” Hall: My twenty years in Linux• Chad Wollenburg: Open Source in Education• Paul Asadoorian: The 10 Commandments of Embedded Device Security• Tracy Holtz: Open Source in Small Businesses• Door to Door Geek: Recording Professional Podcasts in Open Source• Ask the Geek: A Panel Discussion Moderated by Russ Wenner

Fiftonefifty discusses the utility byobu

byobu – A wrapper for screen and tmux•Usage byobu-tmux [tmux options] , byobu-screen [screen options] , just byobu defailts to tmux•The Caption line shows your open windows, and highlights the one upon which you are focused, and optionally displays your user name, host name, IP address, and a hint that there is a Menu available if you press F9. •The Hard Status line consists of color coded output and symbols with configurable and dynamically updated facts, statistics, and information about the local system. •STATUSNOTIFICATIONS are fully documented in the linked reference

Key Bindings that I find moste useful• F2 Create a new window • F3 Move to the previous window • F4 Move to the next window • F5 Refresh all status notifications • F6 Detach from the session and logout • Shift-F6 Detach from the session, but do not logout

I had installed too much crap on my regular server (Owncloud, Elgg, WordPress, Plex etc.) and thought it was time to wipe it and start over. I figured in the mean time I would try and use one of my Raspberry Pis as a file sharing server. I had talked to serveral people about using Owncloud on the Raspberry Pi using Nginx as opposed to Apache so I shut down my server and started this project.

started with a minimal Raspbian based distro called Minibian. Minibian is basically Raspbian without X and ssh already set up.

Next I installed Samba for file sharing (2 quick hints always always always make a back up of your smb.conf file before doing anything. Second pay attention to file permissions. Things like chmod and chown are your friends. Also if anyone can give a good explanation of the difference between chmod and chown I would like to hear it. I know there is a difference I’m just not sure what exactly it is.

Next I WAS going to install Owncloud with Nginx but Kwisher told me about a little program called Seafile. Seafile is a web based file sharing program.

Some quick thoughts about Seafile. It runs real smooth. Better than Owncloud did on my old server. I don’t like the fact that files that are uploaded to the server are not saved in a way that would make them easily accessible to the server admin. I think they are encrypted on the server side. I want to play with it more because they have a command line client for linux and I want to try syncing files and see if that might solve my problem of not having the files accessible on the server.

Next I had heard about a web based email client called Roundcube. I first heard about this program on a podcast called SourceTrunk, a great podcast where the host reviews and tests out open source software (episode 096, released 2014-01-30). I thought I could benefit from a web based email client because I had a desire to run an email client but I am not always able to be at my computer, though I can sometimes get internet access. So I thought this might be fun to try out.

Roundcube is in the raspbian repos so I tried just a straight apt-get install roundcube. It stalled out midway through because it saw sqlite. so I had to install the rest by apt-get install mysql. Then I had to download the latest package of roundcube off there site and compile it.

fiftyonefifty: Automatically Launch Applications in Linux

Of course, the traditional way is to put it in /etc/rc.local (note, in some distros you might have to make rc.local executable). But this won’t work for a application that needs to run under X, like a mixer.

Most desktops have their own way of autolaunching apps, but if you move between desktops, you may want to configure autostart only once.

Find the dot desktop file for the application. (Most applications that appear in you menus will have a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications/. I found kmix.desktop in /usr/share/applications/kde4/).

Copy it to ~/.config/autostart/ or /etc/xdg/autostart (depending on the values in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS).

Use chmod to make it executable.

Solution: We solved this during the show. Apparently, there is not good autostart for every desktop, because desktop apps should load after the window manager. For lxde, autostart is /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart

apt-listchanges and apt-listbugs: these are scripts which run after apt-get install or aptitude install downloads the .deb files: apt-listchanges can compare a new version of a package with the one currently installed and show what has been changed, by extracting the relevant entries from the Debian changelog and NEWS files. apt-listbugs lists critical (chattr was mistaken when he said severe, grave and important) bug reports from the Debian Bug Tracking System. It runs after downloading the .deb files to see if an upgrade or installation is known to be unsafe

-Listener feedback gives us a good tip on how to fix clicking wheel troubles for Sansa e260 devices.

I’ve been running rockbox on my Fuze since late 2010 (first time I /joined #rockbox on freenode was Fri Oct 1 2010.

Go to rockbox.org, locate your player make and model, download the rockbox manual for your player, read through the manual, download the install utility http://www.rockbox.org/download/ and you’ll get some basic themes. you can select other themes from rockbox.org.

Rockbox on my devices supports sdhc cards up to 32GB along with internal storage. I used fdisk to partition the card and mkfs to put a vfat filesystem on the card.

Boot into the stock firmware and put the Sansa device into usb|msc mode, mount the device and run the installer. The default mode is mtp, and I have never tried to access either device in mtp mode, only usb|msc mode. The installer is a graphical application. The installer handles everything, all you need to know is where the device is mounted. The installer puts a bootloader and the rockbox firmware on the device. When you power on the device, you always have the option to boot into rockbox or boot into the stock firmware.

I got a Clip Zip as an emergency backup player: sooner or later, I expect the Fuze to fail (nothing electronic lasts forever).

Many additional features are available in rockbox compared with the stock firmware: file manipulation and listing, a database is created of all the files, so you can select what file to listen to by selecting a file from the file listing or selecting using the database listing.

The Fuze Clip Zip with rockbox has fewer features than the Fuze. The Fuze uses a wheel with center button (select) while the Clip Zip used a north-south-east-west selector plus center button. My muscle memory for navigating and selecting files or features, is better with the Fuze.

The Fuze Clip Zip uses the center select button for a lot more than the Fuze, and different actions are triggered by short, medium and long select presses.

Both devices use proprietary cables for data transfer and battery recharging. Battery life seems about the same for both devices: I’ll start an eight hour work shift with 100% battery and by the end of the shift, having listened for 5 or 6 hours, I’ll be at maybe 40%.

The Fuze sometimes resets when copying a file and I have to wait for the process to stop, unmount and remount the device. Once a month (or less often) my machine crashes and I have to do a hard reboot: maybe a bad cable, wrapped|folded too many times?

I’ve only listened to .mp3 or .ogg files on both devices. There may be some way to watch videos, but I’ve never tried.

There may be a way rockbox can increase the audio playback tempo per file, but I’ve not looked into doing that. (Increasing the playback without altering the voices so they sound like Mickey Mouse.)

5150 Talks about creating an IRC Channel
Registering a Freenode.Net IRC channel and setting up operators

• Establish your new Freenode channel
• Freeenode was originally set up to support development projects and that is still reflected in their mission statement.
• To register a channel, you must have a registered nick
• Channel naming official (primary) channels start with a single hash. Secondary, unofficial channel names start with two hashes. Say we wanted to create a sub channel to discuss the design of the web page, we might call it ##LinuxLUGCastWordpress
• Check the availabilty of the the channel you want to register. Freenode says to use /msg ChanServ info #MyNewChannel , but that command never returned anything for me, even with channels I knew existed. Do worry, ChanServ won’t let you register a channel name (case insensitive) that already exits.
• All you have to do to create a channel is to join it /join #MyNewChannel Note, you re automatically set as admin for this channel. Of course, if you don’t register the channel (or hold it open with a bot), it will disappear as soon as all users leave.
• Now register your channel /msg ChanServ register #MyNewChannel
• Set yourself up as administrator (Operator, or op) for your channel
• But I’m already an op since I created the channel, you say. Not so much I’m afraid. Leave the channel and come back, see, you are no longer OP.
• You are not an OP but you are the Founder, which gives you right to make people, including youself, OPs
• /msg ChanServ OP #MyNewChannel MyNick
• If you want to set up your fellow OPs at this point use /msg ChanServ OP #MyNewChannel OtherOpNick
• Set operator defaults for yourself and your fellow operators
• But wait a minute, I’m still not an OP! If you are using a GUI IRCmanager, like XChat, if you right click on your name you will find a menu item like “Operator Actions”, and under that “Give Ops” and “Take Ops”. You can elevate yourself here, and you can do the same for the others you made OPs (though they won’t be able to do it for themselves yet).
• You set operator defaults with the FLAGS command. The +O arguement means the user will always join the channel as an OP, +o joins them as a regular user with the option to elevate themselves, i.e:
• You always want to join the channel as an OP, issue: /msg ChanServ FLAGS #MyNewChannel MyNick +O
• If you want the other OP you created to join a a regular user with the power to make themselves an OP, issue: /msg ChanServ FLAGS #MyNewChannel OtherOpNick +o